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Vital Transgressions Screening + Talk
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Vital Trangressions is a 4-year research-creation laboratory that tests the dynamic and troubled relationship between queer transgression and queer activism on screen.
When Foucault was invoking transgression and the spiral to approach Bataille, he was working within a disciplinary paradigm where queer/Trans bodies and subjects remained largely outlawed and shunned by our states, churches, and societies. This was the era of The Body Politic, Toronto’s gay liberation magazine, where transgression and activism famously co-existed in a tense and productive duet.
Half a century later, we find our LGBTQ+ selves at the centre of a homo-nationalized mainstream, embraced by banks and vodka brands, ‘proud’ citizens possessing pink rights and rainbow mortgages. Neo-liberalism has sought to domesticate and monetize our communities. Yet in the face of such domestication, questions of on-screen transgression and activism remain even more urgent for a new generation. At their core is an aching dilemma: if transgression’s signature move is productive outrage, and activism’s raison d’etre is tactical efficacy, are the two doomed to stick to their respective lanes — or can they jump the tracks (and meet in the gutter)?
VT invites a community of thinkers and makers to explore this key question: in our post-queer moment, can activism and transgression meaningfully collaborate, reigniting the promise of new queer/trans cinemas today?
Each film/filmmaker/s will have 15 minutes to present their films. Following the 6 presentations, we’ll have 20 min of dialogue with a moderator between the 6 projects, and then open it up for questions.
Films
Friends and collaborators Amina Cruz and Jamie Ross stage a response to one of the earliest pornographic films surviving in its entirety, El Satario (1907), a rare print of which is held in the University of Toronto’s Sexual Representation Collection. The tale of outdoor sex is adapted by erotic performers from the contemporary DIY porn and postporn milieux of the US and Mexico, more than a century later.
What is, or might have been, a queer Arab girlhood seen through the lens of many decades, diasporic displacements, civil war, transition, and transformed yet enduring geographies, desires, politics and languages? In this poetic video short, two women dream towards the past, and open themselves to how the past persists and fashions this present, in ways that are intimate, violent, and unknowable. Shot between Lebanon and Nova Scotia, and employing some archival footage, it offers traces of lives lived and imagined.
Pornography is watched privately at home for our own pleasure, but just outside, the Hungry Ghost Festival burns all around in honour of our ancestors trapped in another realm. As hungry ghosts make their annual sojourn into the human realm and enjoy the offerings of food and song, what if all they desired was just to be touched?
Toss & Turn explores intimate histories embedded within discarded mattresses found in Montreal’s streets. Often overlooked or considered waste, these mattresses become sacred sites for memories of rest, desire, displacement, and survival. They serve as both sculptural screens and symbolic anchors onto which carefully shot images of queer bodies are projected. These projections are then refilmed during street interventions, creating layered documentation that becomes the primary content for the final film.
A hybrid short film combining documentary, science fiction, film-poem, and essay, Scarsedge traces t4t intimacy, viral contagion, and hormonal transformation across bodies and landscapes. Set after the world has already ended, following an act of trans bioterrorism and the convulsions of empires, there emerges an undergrowth of touch, light, skin, and scars.
“I discovered who I was at Dylan’s Sleepover and all I got was this lousy short.”
Biographies
Jamie Ross is a filmmaker, visual artist, curator, and writer. Queer secrecy, separatism, and clandestine cultures are focuses of his research and art-making. In 2020, Ross uncovered a Queer Victorian secret society and underground seashell museum raided by the Los Angeles police in 1914, and with a Fulbright Scholarship, directed a documentary film installation involving loans of marine biology materials collected by the Victorian queens. In 2022, Ross co-directed a half-hour film with his father on his practice as a ballet dancer, a secret he had kept for almost 50 years, in a shift towards projects intended for theatres instead of museums and galleries. It was awarded the Audience Award for Best Short Film at its premiere at Hot Docs in 2022.
Ross is working on their first feature film, a portrait of the site of outdoor sex in Montreal over the course of a 150 years with Eyesteelfilm (coming in 2027). Jamie has a MFA from UCLA and lives between Los Angeles and Montreal.
Amina Cruz is an artist born and raised in Los Angeles, CA and teen years in Tampa, FL. She hitchhiked around the country before deciding to move to New York City, where she earned her BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design. She also holds a MFA from University of California, Los Angeles.
Cruz’s photographs are utopias and landscapes filled with conversations, power, relationships, memories, joy, and fantasies that you can feel. Her interests are based in queer culture, film/analog photography, and exploring the space between transformation and identity. Her work has been exhibited at MOCA Tucson, San Diego Art Institute, Creative Center for Photography, The Getty, and galleries throughout the country. Cruz’s work is held in various private collections and institutions, including Loyola Marymount University, University of California, Santa Barbra, and The Getty.
Trish Salah is an Arab Canadian poet, scholar and activist. In the early 1990s, she was active in the Montreal small press and spoken word scene before relocating to Toronto, where she participated in Mirha-Soleil Ross’ Counting Past 2: Performance/Film/Video/Spoken Word with Transsexual Nerve, among other arts and activist projects. Her first book, Wanting in Arabic (TSAR 2002) was published at a time when poetry collections by trans women were difficult to come by, and the 2013 reissue won a Lambda Literary Award. Salah is also the author of Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 (Roof 2014, Metonymy 2017) and co-editor of special issues of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Arc Poetry Magazine. Selections of her poetry have appeared in Greek, French, Spanish and Arabic translation. An associate professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University she teaches at the intersections of trans/queer, psychoanalytic, and anti-colonial poetics, creative writing and theory.
Dina Georgis is a writer and academic. Her scholarship and writing bring together postcolonial studies, queer theory, and psychoanalysis to explore how expressive cultures respond to loss, conflict, displacement, and the enduring dilemmas of colonial legacies.
She is the author of The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East (SUNY Press, 2013), a book that examines the emotional dimensions of political conflict, the stories and subjectivities that emerge from it, and the possibilities for making life livable amid conditions of violence and loss.
Alongside her academic work, Georgis writes critically on art, memory, sexuality, and political life. Her essays have explored the relationship between art and memory in the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War, as well as questions of queer Arab sexuality and subjectivity. Across her scholarship and writing, she is interested in how stories, affects, and cultural expression can create alternative ways of understanding personal and collective histories.
CHRIS CHONG CHAN FUI is an artist who works between digital / analog moving images and fabricated / organic objects to reveal unfamiliar narratives. His work layers the social and natural sciences with transnational circuits of globalization and manufactured cultures and landscapes. With a rigorous research methodology and a formalist aesthetic, he uses structure and constraints as a creative path towards expression. Chong has exhibited at such venues as the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Palais de Tokyo, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, and the Gwangju Biennale, while premiering films at the Cannes Film Festival’s Directors’ Fortnight, BFI London, and TIFF’s Wavelengths. He is a Smithsonian Institute fellow (National Museum of Natural History), a Ford Foundation fellow, and a Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Arts Fellow. Chong holds an MFA from York University and is an Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations.
75 SHOTS Pocket Cinema is a queer-led, volunteer-run, member-driven nonprofit media arts collective founded by filmmaker and curator Karin Hazé in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal in 2016. We are home to fearless storytellers, queer filmmakers from criminalized contexts, and artists from across the Global South and its diaspora who refuse to conform.
Through mobile-film training, participatory productions, collective filmmaking, curation, and community screenings, we create radical, experimental cinema. Mobile filmmaking is at the heart of our practice, both for its distinctive aesthetic and its resourcefulness.
Our films have been made and screened in underground gatherings across Africa, including in countries where queerness is criminalized and gathering openly can put people in danger, and, paradoxically, showcased at the Human Rights Conference at WorldPride Amsterdam 2026, the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations Headquarters in New York (CSW69), the McCord Stewart Museum in Montréal, and several international film festivals and community spaces across Canada, Europe, and Africa. Through these screenings, we continue reclaiming public spaces for under-represented queer gathering, exchange, and visibility.
Ester Bergsmark is an artist, filmmaker, writer, and artistic researcher working across experimental cinema, fiction, text and performance. Her work explores desire, memory, tactility and embodied spectatorship, approaching cinema as a sensory language and a poetry of perception.
Her latest feature, A Sweetness from Nowhere, premiered at CPH in 2026. Previous films include Something Must Break (2014), She Male Snails (2012), Maggie in Wonderland (2008), and Swedish Candy, Some Violence and a Bit of Cat (2018).
Her artistic research project voice under (PhD, Stockholm University of the Arts, 2023) was presented as a solo exhibition at Accelerator in Stockholm in 2024. Her practice also extends into writing and performance, including collaborations with writer, artist, and curator Andria Nyberg Forshage.
Andria Nyberg Forshage is a writer, curator, artist, and poet. Her genre-queer writing and transdisciplinary, post-media practice deals with trans feminist aesthetics and posthuman ecologies, theories of violence, and reconfigurations of perception and desire.
They are a contributing editor of Paletten Art Journal and has participated in CuratorLab at Konstfack, with an MA in Aesthetics from Södertörn University. Her artistic and curatorial work has featured with Moderna Museet, Konsthall C, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Kai Art Center, My Wild Flag, and more, and her writing appears in many publications including Frieze, The Routledge Handbook of Queer Death Studies, Datableed, and Kritiker.
Kalil Haddad is an experimental filmmaker based in Toronto. He has written, directed, and edited more than a dozen short films, including The Taking of Jordan (2022), His Smell (2023), Victim of Circumstance (2024), and My Secret Boyfriend Died in a Mass Shooting (2025).
His films have screened at Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, Kasseler Dokfest, Fantasia, London Short Film Festival, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Onion City Experimental Film Festival, where The Taking of Jordan received the Jury Prize for Best of the Festival. His work has been featured in BOMB Magazine, Reverse Shot, Tone Glow, and Ultra Dogme.
He Never Dies, a touring showcase of collected works, launched in July 2025 at Spectacle Theater and Los Angeles Filmforum. His latest project, You Sorta Know It’s Gonna End (2025), is a collaborative film mixtape with Ryan Steel.
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